Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 11:43:04 -0700
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: Re: (urth) Two Silk questions

Nutria wrote:
>Pas is not yet dead when Silk sees his dead biological parents in the
>Outsider's "Mainframe," so he cannot be Silk's father.

Ah, but we are talking =biological= life here, not VR life in Mainframe.
And I'm sure you will agree that Typhon, the biological pre-form of Pas, is
long dead by the time of Silk; as is Typhon's extramarital girlfriend.

(I mean, as far as a =spiritual= father for Silk, obviously that would be
Patera Pike, but he does not show up in the four parents.  The biological
parents are shown and the foster mother who bore him and raised him, and
the calde' who she loved.)

The stretch is that the original scans (Typhon and bimbo) become the first
mundane inhabitants of Mainframe, which then becomes more populated as
generations die and are uploaded.

Maybe it is the contrast between real heaven and Mainframe.

> I think the
>blondness of Pas and Kypris is a thematic parallel, or a red herring, or both.
>         You might be right that they chose Silk because of blond parents
>(how common would such be in South America?). Yet, given how the embryos
>have been ruined, how could they know when he would be born, or that he
>would be born before landfall? Not possible to plan this, I think. The
>selection of Silk's embryo for birth is part of the Outsider's plan, not
>Pas's.
>         Thus, I think it is a literary coincidence.

Sure, that is valid.

But what I'm talking about has nothing to do with "how could they know when
he would be born."  It has everything to do with genetic identification,
like a remote DNA test or whatever.  A genetic fingerprint that can be
detected.  Through Mainframe, Silk is known at a level deeper than surface
features; it seems likely to me that his genetic enhancements raise cryptic
flags that at least conspirator gods (i.e., Pas and Kypris) can see, if not
flags that all gods can see.

Mainframe, I contend, is not just a bunch of timetables and birth
announcements, with every little ant-like person being tracked from cradle
to grave.  Mainframe has more to it than just matching up a face to a
driver's license photo or auger's certificate to determine identity.

At the more pedestrian level, I'm saying that when a person dies and goes
to Mainframe (which seems to have VR ghosts of real people), the entity in
Mainframe is a scan that was taken of the living person: this scan is held
in limbo until the death of the person and then it is released into the
Mainframe visiting lounge or Mainframe proper.  Ideally perhaps the scan
would be taken at the moment of dying, but how often this could happen (one
needs to be facing a working monitor, after all) remains vague.

The old calde' talked Silk's surrogate mother into carrying the frozen
embryo to term; the child is born, as a man he is recognized by Kypris, and
things begin to happen.  In retrospect, if we believe that Silk was an
engineered creature built to Pas's secret specifications, as I think most
of us do, then he is just another hidden tool, like a cane-sword, for Pas
to use should the need arise. The shocking thing would be if cunning Pas
had only made =one= such tool, and there are plenty of hints that he made
many, and hints that the other gods and goddesses had their own secret
projects as well.  Tools that are squirreled away in the woodwork, just in
case they might be needed.  Plus we know that there was a lot of family
tension, on the Whorl and in the biological pre-forms left back on Urth,
leading to big rebellion.

=mantis=



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